To see Big Data at work, look to Google, where number-crunching on a massive scale has changed hiring and management practices. Measurements and analytics rule at Google. “All people decisions at Google are based on data and analytics,” according to Kathryn Dekas, a manager in Google’s “people analytics” team. Google’s conclusions have a bearing on where CLOs should be focusing their efforts.

If you interviewed for a job at Google several years ago, you might have been asked to answer questions like these:

You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and thrown into a blender. Your mass is reduced so that your density is the same as usual. The blades start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?

What’s the next number in this sequence: 10, 9, 60, 90, 70, 66 … ?

Using only a four-minute hourglass and a seven-minute hourglass, measure exactly nine minutes—without the process taking longer than nine minutes.

A book has N pages, numbered the usual way, from 1 to N. The total number of digits in the page numbers is 1,095. How many pages does the book have?

A man pushed his car to a hotel and lost his fortune. What happened?

Your odds of getting an interview greatly improved if you had a high GPA, astronomical SATs, and graduated from an Ivy League college because the founders believed these things were important.

No longer. Brainteaser questions have been banned, Google recruiters no longer ask about grades, and you don’t have to have a college degree to land a job.

In an interview published in The New York Times last June, Lazslo Bock, Google’s SVP of People Operations said, “On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time. They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.”

College didn’t matter either. Statistics found that GPAs and SAT did not correlate to success on the job, so Google stopped using them. Even earning a college degree rarely seemed to make a difference in job performance, so Google no longer requires a degree to get hired.

Students in school learn to give specific answers. They memorize and parrot back explicit information. In the workaday world, often there is no pat answer. The challenge is to formulate the questions as well as the answers. Google is seeking people who can solve problems that don’t have a clear answer.

The numbers told Google that its most innovative workers “are those who have a strong sense of mission about their work and who also feel that they have much personal autonomy.” Google looks to what people can become as they grow on the job, not where they come from.

Leadership. “We’ll want to know how you’ve flexed different muscles in different situations in order to mobilize a team.”

Role-Related Knowledge. “We’re looking for people who have a variety of strengths and passions, not just isolated skill sets. We also want to make sure that you have the experience and the background that will set you up for success in your role.” Technical hires — about half of new Googlers — must demonstrate their ability to code,

How You Think. “We’re less concerned about grades and transcripts and more interested in how you think. We’re likely to ask you some role-related questions that provide insight into how you solve problems.”

Googleyness. “We want to get a feel for what makes you, well, you. We also want to make sure this is a place you’ll thrive, so we’ll be looking for signs around your comfort with ambiguity, your bias to action and your collaborative nature.”

Bock says. “The No. 1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it’s not IQ. It’s learning ability. It’s the ability to process on the fly. It’s the ability to pull together disparate bits of information.”

Google is more interested in who people are than what they know. Experience is the teacher, not the classroom.

Your company’s situation may differ. Google is exceptional, an outlier, and it draws on an extraordinary talent pool. But all-in-all, Google’s findings bring into question training’s usual focus on knowledge over personal growth.

How much of your organization’s investment in L&D centers on developing people rather than teaching skills? At Google, self-directed continuous learning is the norm. Job rotation is fluid. There’s little formal training.

If Google doesn’t value college credentials, it makes one wonder about the national drive for STEM education.

I’ve posted answers to the brainteasers at http://internettime.com/google

Formal gets all the money, but today more learning happens outside the classroom

Learning is more important than ever. We have an information explosion. The world is becoming more complex. We have to learn more just to keep living our lives. That doesn’t mean we need training departments — and that’s where the budgets are cut.

We need to pay more attention to experiential learning, We need to look at peer-to-peer learning. A lot of the courses out there are absolute crap. If you look at behavior on the job, you’d be lucky if you find 15% of the results of courses.

So get rid of lots of the structure, which by the way mimics school and that’s not a good model for learning. Look at ways people can really accelerate their learning — by having managers who encourage people by setting stretch goals and by encouraging individual initiative. It’s important to have a lot more of these.

And I have to comment on eLearning. eLearning covers all manner of sins. There’s great stuff out there and you can take part in in at 2:00 am if you want. But there’s also some absolute garbage shovel-ware that nobody should have to endure. All it is is “e” — electronic, and that’s not enough for quality.

I first heard about informal learning was at a conference in Orlando, Florida, a dozen years ago. Peter Henschel from the Institute on Learning described how sent anthropologists to an insurance company to investigate how people learned their jobs. The scientists discovered than over 80% of the way people learned their jobs was informal. There was no control. It was, “Hey, I’m going to watch you. You’re good at this. I’m going to mimic your behavior.” Or I try something, make a mistake, and say “Whoops, I’m not going to do that again.” Maybe I’m going to read something at night on my own.

Most of this doesn’t happen in training classes. Research in Canada, in Massachusetts, and a number of other places, usually with government funding, found generally 80% of the way people learn their jobs is informally.

When I say informal, I mean that the person who is learning is in control of the learning. They are choosing the learning experience they want to get into. Maybe the boss said, “It would be good for you to speak French; I’m sending you on an assignment in France.” It’s a lot different from a top-down structure.

That’s what got me into informal learning but what got me writing about it, because deep down I’m a business guy at heart, is that all the money was going into the formal training and almost all of the learning was going on in the informal side. This mismatch didn’t set right with my soul.

The explanation for the anomaly is that often training departments work only with novices, and training novices takes a sort of school focus. You have an empty vessel and you try to fill it. Training departments seem to overlook employees who are further along in their profession, figuring “they’re not going to go for it.”

CLOs tell me the stuff that keeps them awake at night is that now the realization that learning is social, mobile, and collaborative. Learning happens in social networks. It happens in the course of work. This is brand new turf for the profession. They have scant experience with it.

As for metrics, the appropriate metrics for learning are “Are they doing the job better?” The intermediate part, I don’t care about. The fiction that’s been going around since the fifties, that you have four tiers — how happy are they, can they repeat it back, can they actually do anything, and did it doing anything for the business — I say to hell with the first three. All that matters is whether it did anything for the business.

The person who makes a difference in metrics is the person who has checkbook power. If that person is convinced that the workers did this and they’re performing better as a result, I’ll buy it. It’s never going to be 3-point accuracy. It’s like in marketing, where we can’t tell which part of the advertising leads to sales. We’re never going to be very precise, but if we’re believed, that’s all it takes to get the budget and make things happen.

Your organization has decided to tilt in the direction of informal learning. Colleagues tell you that it can be faster, better, and cheaper than traditional approaches. You need to satisfy increasing demands with reduced staff and budget. You’re concerned that your current offerings will not satisfy the new generation of workers. So now what do you do?

Two options

1. Masterclass for L&D managers, instructional designers, and senior instructors on the concept and implementation of informal learning. This is generally a one-half or one-day onsite engagement with thirty to forty people.

2. Retreat for CLOs, HR directors, planners, and policy makers on the philosophy of informal learning, the change management process required to support it, and the corporate culture that fosters its success. Two or three managers spend two days at the Internet Time Lab in Berkeley, California, in a heavily personalized experience.

What’s covered?

Here’s an overview of the topics from recent Masterclasses.

What is the organization’s primary goal?
How well are you preparing people for the future needs of the organization?

Introduction to informal learning. Push vs. pull. The spectrum. How to recognize it in its many forms.

A dive into 70:20:10 as an example of informal, experiential learning.

A dose of my philosophies of what matters in life and learning.

We talk about how schooling is the wrong model for organizational learning and discourage using schoolish vocabulary.

From this foundation, we explore communities of practice, capturing and disseminating news, knowledge sharing at Intel, experiential learning at Xerox, conversation at HP, volunteerism at SAP, Twitter at Deloitte, product knowledge at BT, and learning from microblogs. We also address implementation and values at a large company rollout, curation as learning, and creating the business case in several different industries.

Depending on the level of the group, we may apply the 10-step implementation program from the 702010Forum.

Recent Masterclasses and Retreats

We recently conducted half-day Masterclasses at the WorldBank (above) and Dutch high-tech company Ordina (below).

Senior managers and strategists attended a two-day management planning retreat at the Internet Time Lab earlier this year.

Members of the Internet Time Alliance may join us virtually or in person during a retreat. In this case, Harold Jarche and I joined forces to help this team launch an expansive nationwide educational arm for a major non-profit.

To maintain quality, I offer no more than four Internet Time Lab Retreats per year.

Better I should have talked about Experiential Learning, for that’s the informal learning with the most impact. People learn by doing. The primary way workers learn their jobs is by doing them. The workplace is generally a better place to learn than the classroom.

I do what I do not know how to do in order to learn how to do it. Picasso

Years ago a start-up commissioned me to write a white paper that would help put them on the map. I wrote the paper that follows. It’s probably the most popular thing I’ve ever written. The start-up stiffed me but the paper morphed into the Informal Learning book. I think it’s held up rather well. I’ll be leading a series of master classes on informal learning and working smarter in Europe

Informal Learning – the other 80%

Execution is the goal

This paper addresses how organizations, particularly business organizations, can get more done. Workers who know more get more accomplished. People who are well connected make greater contributions than those who are not. Employees and partners with more capacity to learn are more versatile in adapting to future conditions. The people who create the most value are those who know the right people, the right stuff, and the right things to do.

It’s all a matter of learning, but it’s not the sort of learning that is the province of training departments, workshops, and classrooms. Most people in training programs learn only a little of the right stuff, are fuzzy about how to apply what they’ve learned, and never address who are the right people to know.

People learn to build the right network of associates and the right level of expertise through informal, sometimes even accidental, learning that flies beneath the corporate radar. Because organizations are oblivious to informal learning, they fail to invest in it. As a result, their execution is less than it might be.

Let’s look at what informal learning is and what to do to leverage it.

“The best learning happens in real life with real problems and real people and not in classrooms.” Charles Handy

At work we learn more in the break room than in the classroom. We discover how to do our jobs throughinformal learning — observing others, asking the person in the next cubicle, calling the help desk, trial-and-error, and simply working with people in the know. Formal learning – classes and workshops and online events – is the source of only 10% to 20% of what we learn at work.

Informal learning is effective because it is personal. The individual calls the shots. The learner is responsible. It’s real. How different from formal learning, which is imposed by someone else. How many learners believe the subject matter of classes and workshops is “the right stuff?” How many feel the corporation really has their best interests at heart? Given today’s job mobility, workers who delegate responsibility for learning to their employers will become perpetual novices.

In spite of this, corporations, non-profits, and government invest most of their budgets in formal learning, when it’s apparent that most learning is informal. This stands common sense on its head. It’s the 20/80 rule: Invest your resources where they’ll do the least good.

When I’ve pointed this out in presentations at conferences, members of the audience ask what they can do to improve informal learning. After all, they already have discussion boards and virtual classrooms and videoconference gear. I tell them they need to go beyond dumb technology. Linking me to a chat session is the equivalent of showing me the way to the library. Everything I need is in there, but it’s up to me to find it.

[Today’s teenager] “wants to socialize instead of communicate,” Tammy Savage, group manager of Microsoft’s NetGen division, said in a recent interview. “They want to do things together and get things done–and they really want to meet new people. They have a way of vouching for each other as friends, figuring out who to trust and not trust.” [1]

Achieving the proper balance

Neither investing in only formal training and education nor placing all your bets on informal learning is a good strategy. Extremism is rarely the answer to questions of human development. What you are after is the best mix of formal and informal means.

Achieving balance requires a scale of measurement. The metrics of our scale are the organization’s core objectives:

In the past, corporate America relied on training and indoctrination to meet these objectives. This worked better in yesterday’s command-and-control hierarchies than in today’s laissez-faire organizations. Now it’s often more effective to take control by giving control, by letting “the invisible hand” self-organize worker learning. The organization establishes the goals and gives the workers flexibility in how to meet them.

An organization named CapitalWorks [3] surveyed hundreds of knowledge workers about how they really learned to do their jobs.

Workers reported that informal learning was three times more important in becoming proficient on the job than company-provided training.

Workers learn as much during breaks and lunch as during on- and off-site meetings.

Most workers report that they often need to work around formal procedures and processes to get their jobs done.

Most workers developed many of their skills by modeling the behavior of co-workers.

Approximately 70% of respondents want more interactions with co-workers when their work changes.

Combining the results of CapitalWorks’ formal and informal learning surveys, here’s how people report becoming proficient in their work.

Tell me why

Isn’t this amazing? What on earth has led us to a situation where corporations overwhelmingly invest in formal training but workers overwhelmingly learn informally?

In his new book, Clusters of Creativity [4] , Rob Koepp writes “The dot-com craze was often seen in humanist terms — a force democratizing information, building online communities, increasing opportunities for entrepreneurs. Yet dot-com mania’s article of faith was that the technologies of the Internet essentially made human beings irrelevant. People became abstractions, recognized only as hits, clicks and eyeballs that propped up the preposterous market values of e-commerce plays.”

Real people are complex, integrated beings. Each is whole, unto him or herself. Body, mind, intention and emotion are inseparably bound. Situating our brains in our heads oversimplifies the situation; our brains are distributed throughout our bodies. Nerves, eyes, and receptors are all part of the way we think. And emotion? It’s inextricably linked to the other mental and bodily functions. The amygdala shapes the internal movie we call our time-delayed “reality” with emotion before we become aware.

Adapting to one’s environment involves much more than exposure to content. It is a whole-body experience. You cannot learn while someone is stomping your toes. You won’t pay attention unless other people are involved.

Other factors work to obscure the importance of informal learning:

Learning implies school. School is chock full of formal learning — courses, classes, and grades that obscure the fact that most learning at school is either self-directed or informal.

Vendors don’t make money from informal learning. Hence, it’s not promoted at conferences, in magazines, and through sales calls.

The rapid pace of technological innovation and economic change almost guarantees that formal learning will be dated.

One aspect of informal learning that makes it so powerful also makes the informal process forgettable: it often comes in small pieces.

Who’s in charge of informal learning? Most of the time, it’s the individual worker. Another reason informal falls off the corporate radar.

Most informal learning takes place in the “shadow organization,” oft described as “the way things really work,” as opposed to the boxes on the organization chart and their clearly delineated budgets.

Ottersurf’s Clark Quinn [5] notes that corporations invest in formal learning because it’s the one means they know – and know how to handle. “They’re still in the industrial model. Corporate learning lags the knowledge age and its associated technology. Sadly, this is a low priority with most CEO’s.”

“We learn by conversing with ourselves, with others, and with the world around us.”

Laurie Thomas & Sheila Harrie-Augstein

How workers learn now

Think about a go-getter knowledge worker learns something new. [6] The Training Department has been downsized. Even if it were at full strength, it’s unlikely Training would have much to offer on a new topic. So the worker checks Google or SlashDot or other resources on the web to see who’s got books or articles or blogs or case studies on her topic. In my case, I’d probably check the O’Reilly site since I maintain a virtual bookshelf there that gives me access to scads of technical books.

After the worker gets a sketchy framework of what’s to be learned, it’s time to dive in. Try things. Build on knowledge of similar subjects. Ask people in the office who’ve been there. Check with the technical equivalent of the jailhouse lawyer. The goal is not to master a subject area or pass a test; it’s to find out enough to dive into trial-and-error or to get the immediate job done. The worker doesn’t take off for a weeklong workshop; more likely, he picks up bits and pieces day-by-day for months.

This is self-directed learning, and that’s yet another reason it escapes notice. No one is responsible for toting up the learning every worker is engaged in. I wouldn’t be surprised if informal learning always outweighs formal learning in impact. Wonderful book title: All Learning is Self-Directed. [7]

At the beginning of this section, I said we were looking over the shoulder of a go-getter learner. Today, we’re in transition. Many learners are not self-directed; they are waiting for directions. It’s time to tell them that the rules have changed. It’s in their self interest to convert from training pawns to proactive learning opportunists.

Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them become what they are capable of becoming.

Goethe

The New World

The world is moving a lot faster than when your father was a boy. In those days, a small intellectual elite identified what people should know. It didn’t change. Teachers taught it. The assumption was that you weren’t going to need to learn much after graduation. Folk wisdom, along with some psychologists, held that you couldn’t teach an old dog new tricks or an old worker much of anything. The ability of humans to learn was presumed to decay over time.

Time is speeding up. In agrarian days, time didn’t matter so long as you got up around sunrise and turned in at sunset. Railroads had to keep schedules — and require people to agree on the time. (Before railroads, time zones were unnecessary–and often arbitrary.) Military coordination and air travel require even greater precision. These days, two minutes to receive a message from the other side of the world feels agonizingly slow. When I studied physics in college, we never talked about nanoseconds.

Now new discoveries and information gush out through our televisions, mail, the net, telephones, and friends at a staggering rate. A four-year degree in engineering will be obsolete in four years. Computer literacy skipped a generation, by-passing parents whose children now show them how to use the Internet, program their cell phones, and set the clock on the VCR. A good college education is no longer a lifetime meal ticket. If a worker can’t learn things through formal channels, she’ll take matters into her own hands. Workers have taken responsibility for their own learning.

“Brand You.” People direct their learning to improve their marketability. Learning is no longer memorizing what the teacher deems important; the teacher is almost certainly behind the times. Rather, learning is a matter of asking the right questions as well as answering them. By definition, this is a collaborative, community-based approach, for it’s others who help us define what is relevant.

To thrive in this environment, everyone must become student and facultyand publisher and instructional designer.

What does it take to play all these new roles? Ted Kahn [8] has identified seven skills that community-building, knowledge designers must know:

Know-who (social networking skills, locating the key people and communities where competencies, knowledge, and practice reside — and who can add the greatest value to one’s learning and work)

Know-what/Know “what-not” (facts, information, concepts; how to customize and filter out information, distinguish junk and glitz from real substance, ignore unwanted and unneeded information and interactions)

Know-where (where to seek and find the best information and resources one needs in different learning and work situations)

Know-when (process and project management skills, both self-management and collaborative group processes)

Know-why…and Care-why (reflection and organizational knowing about one’s participation and roles in different communities; being ecologically and socially proactive in caring for one’s world, for others, and the environment)

The 3 R’s are nearly obsolete. Reading? I skim or speed read instead of the word-by-word reading school teaches. ‘Rithmetic? Okay, it’s handy to be able to divide by 7 to calculate tips, but I’m rarely far from a calculator. Writing? I didn’t learn to write until I got out of college.

“It is a well-worn cliché that it is not just what you know, but who you know that matters for success. Yet despite this accepted wisdom, most people think of networking as an activity that occurs over cocktails or by virtue of exchanging business cards at trade conferences. Rarely do we see managers systematically assess informal networks within their organizations even though they represent critical individual and organizational assets.”

Find a connection

Thirty years ago an electronic calculator was a novelty that cost $100 or more.

Now everyone has at least one calculator, some of us have dozens, and they’ve become so cheap that it’s easier to get a new one than buy batteries when the original cells run out of juice. The calculator makes it a waste of time to learn long division, how to multiply with logarithms, and how to use a circular slide rule unless you’re a mathematician or perhaps a teacher.

Back in the old days, it sometimes made sense to memorize formulas, mnemonics, the exact date of events, and so forth. At one time in my life, I could recite the books of the Old and New Testaments, the Kings and Queens of England, and every machine language instruction for the NCR 390 computer. Of course I forgot all that long ago. No matter. I’m never far from the Internet, and its memory of these things is better than mine ever was.

In a connected world, it makes no more sense to memorize lists than to learn long division or the kings of England. When I have a good connection to the net or to a human expert who has the answer I’m looking for, that’s often just as good as carrying that answer around in my head. Granted, I need a foundation such as how to cut on the calculator or how to get to Google, but after that I can usually get what I need without relying only on what’s in my head.

Getting things done requires good connections, both the human kind and the Internet kind. You can think of the entire world as an immense interconnected, ever-changing network. Everything is connected to everything else. Thriving in the parts of the net to which we’re directly connected is a function of the number, bandwidth and quality of our connections.

To optimize one’s position in the global net, one can:

Rewire the internal connections (learn, innovate, revisualize)

Improve the bandwidth (e.g., listen more carefully)

Connect to other nodes (e.g., to other people or sources or communities)

Schooling confused us into thinking that learning was equivalent to pouring content into our heads. It’s more practical to think of learning as optimizing our networks.

Learning consists of making good connections. We are each our own sys admins.

Positive learners

Turning learners loose to decide what and how to learn and what connections to make is a new concept in corporate learning. Why? Because managers often start with the mindset that learners are deficient, and the objective is to bring them up to par. Workers resent these assumptions. Their goals are to be the best that they can be, not just to get by.

Optimism works better than pessimism. Better to begin from positive assumptions until proven wrong than to let negativity eliminate options before they have been tested.

Training, like psychology, is inherently pessimistic. Both fields are built on a core belief that people are deficient or dysfunctional.

Psychologists spend most of their time studying the deranged. Then they generalize their findings of these fringe cases to normal people. Hence, the psychological literature is filled with neuroses, diagnostics, therapy, and cures, but precious little on making people who are generally okay better.

Recently, a group of renegade psychologists founded the positive psychology movement. Martin Seligman, former president of the American Psychological Association and author of Learned Optimism and Authentic Happiness [9] , is their ringleader. Seligman studies happy people instead of nut cases. He offers prescriptions to make healthy people better. I am personally happier since reading him.

Most training looks at people as though they were missing something. The consequences of assuming the role of training is to fix what’s broken rather than make what’s already good better are enormous and disastrous.

Largely ineffective negative reinforcement (correct what’s wrong, take the test, do this or else) instead of the positive

Training (we do it to you) instead of learning (co-creation of knowledge)

Disregard for creating new knowledge (for the trainer “knows it all.”) from the learning

Focus on fixing the individual rather than optimizing the team (because the individual trainee will submit to being fixed but the organization is reluctant to join in group therapy)

Similarly, David Cooperrider [10] is helping inspire organizations such as GTE and the U.S. Navy by building on their positive aspects through illustrative stories. He and his associates have found that focusing on problem solving stifles innovation by keeping an organization from going beyond the solution to the problem.

Exchanging the concept of learning as medicine to cure deficiencies for the view of learning as growth experience is not something people accomplish one at a time. Shifts in organizational values and culture require a change management approach, with its stages of anger, denial, bargaining, and acceptance.

Knowledge Creation

Taken from the negative perspective, the learner’s relationship to others is generally more take than give. The learner goes online when stuck for an answer; that solves his or her individual problem.

If we look at learners positively, we see that their learning creates new knowledge. Learners can give more than they take by sharing what they learned and how they learned it with others. At a bare minimum, the first ones to go down a new path could leave breadcrumbs for others to follow by recording their finding in an FAQ. Better still, new conceptualizations, metaphors, and stories co-created with learners could make the journey more effective and enjoyable for those who come later.

Think of a domain, say, chip designers. Or voice-recognition experts. Or international risk managers. They may be from one large organization or from a number of organizations. They come together to solve problems, to improve the quality of their decisions, and to try out new ideas. Longer term, their participation helps their organizations by improving their ability to foresee technological developments and market opportunities, to forge knowledge-based alliances, to benchmark against the rest of the industry, to gain authority with clients, to increase the retention of talent, and to build the capacity to develop new strategic options. [11]

These organizational advantages supplement the individual benefits of membership in the community, such things as help with challenges, access to expertise, self-confidence, a sense of belonging, and the fun of being with colleagues. In an increasingly turbulent and shifting organization, one’s anchor in a professional group provides a network for keeping up with new developments, a means of developing professional reputation, increased marketability, and a strong sense of professional identity.

To create intellectual capital it can use, a company needs to foster teamwork, communities of practice, and other social forms of learning.

Intellectual Capital by Tom Stewart

In sum, communities are much more than a way to make up for knowledge deficiencies of some individuals. They are the means by which organizations create and disseminate new knowledge and best practices. They are how an organization stays at the forefront of knowledge.

Focusing on Core Knowledge

In his marvelous book, Living on the Fault Line, Geoffrey Moore makes a strong case that the path to greater shareholder value is focusing on core activities and outsourcing everything else. You do what’s most rewarding.

It follows that the most valuable thing for people to learn is their organization’s proprietary, core knowledge.

Organizational wealth is created around skills and talents that are proprietary and scarce. To manage and develop human capital, companies must recognize unsentimentally that people with these talents are assets to invest in. Others are costs to be minimized.

eLearning vendors look at another set of economics. For them, generic courseware is more profitable, for you can sell the same thing to a lot of people. So they typically end up producing same-size-fits-all generic programs rather than the proprietary programs that organizations need.

The perpetual dilemma is that we want instruction 1:1 from master to apprentice or custom programs tailored to our precise needs. Neither of these is economically viable.

Collaboration contextualizes content. Local experts add the layer of understanding that converts the generic to the specific, from everyone’s organization to our organization. For example, in-house network might upgrade a course on managing networks to a course on running our network.

How to Create and Expand Core Knowledge

Generic programs do not focus on internal issues: that’s what makes them generic. Work groups always focus on internal issues: that’s their raison d’être.

“While the automated systems approach has its place, we believe that these and other weaknesses prevent the method from supporting scalable solutions to human-interaction intensive learning. However, we are not advocating a return to the one teacher for every student. The dualism of teacher-supports-students or automated-system-supports-students is a false dichotomy. There is another option — students-support-each-other.”

First-generation eLearning had blending all wrong. Implementers thought the important thing was to mix online and F2F. The old hands knew that all along. The blending that counts is the mixture of generic and proprietary. Whip up packaged generic content with informal proprietary information and sip the froth of “how we do things here.”

The hunger for proprietary knowledge does not stop at the firewall. Consider Cisco, a company with a staggering thirst for new-product information and detail. Several years ago, they rolled out an online learning program for their field sales and support employees. The next year they implemented a similar program, absent some employee-only information, for partners like IBM, KPMG, and Accenture. This year they’re opening the connection to customers.

Intention

Marcia Connor throws another variable into the mix: intentionality. [12] The self-directed learner we talked about in the section above was guided by intent. She intended to learn something new and went after it. Not all learning is intentional. We learn things by accident, too.

Often we learn the most when we’re looking for something else. A change in environment sparks new concepts for me. On a recent trip to Paris, ah-ha’s seemed to pop into my consciousness almost continuously. If I’ve got a thorny problem to solve, I tell myself “the boys in the backroom” of my brain will work on it as I sleep, and most of the time I magically awake the next morning with an answer.

We can put ourselves in places where learning accidents are more likely to happen. Again, in my own case, I learn from participation in professional groups. The eLearning Forum conducts a monthly educational meeting. What activity do participants value most highly? Networking. Why? Because they rapidly find out what’s going on in a matter of minutes. They get precisely what they ask for. Compared to most means of learning, this is fun.

Individual learning evolves

For at least twenty years, instructional designers have talked about matching the delivery mode of learning to the style of the individual learner. A visual learner would see lots of pictures and diagrams, a verbal learner would hear and read lots of words, and a kinesthetic learner could take frequent reinforcing exercise breaks. Unfortunately, no one has successfully produced a program in this parallel structure because:

It costs too much to develop separate programs for each learning style

Every learner uses a mix of learning styles, not just one

Judging from Howard Gardner’s work on multiple intelligences, we might have to accommodate a dozen styles, not just three

It’s more relevant to match the delivery mode to the content (e.g. don’t teach bowling from a textbook)

Designers usually only look at the formal component of learning

We have not decided when to match skills and when to oppose them

Perhaps more importantly, how people learn varies as they master a subject and what they already know. A novice needs familiarity with the basics and conceptual understanding. An apprentice needs foundation skills and practice. A seasoned professional needs to keep up with changes in his or her discipline. A master needs recognize when it’s time to innovate and be open to inspirations. Everyone needs to keep up to date with changes.

People love to learn but hate to be taught

Ask net-savvy younger workers how they would like to learn new skills, and they bring up the features they enjoy in other services:

Smart technology that learns about me and makes recommendations, like Amazon

Persistent reputations, as at eBay, so you know who you’re collaborating with

Flexible delivery options, as with the bank offering access by ATM, the Web, phone, or human tellers – give me instruction, an FAQ, a subject-matter expert

Let me choose whether my instruction is push or pull

Give me a way to find out how our company does things, not just generic lessons

Adapt to the learner’s pace, as the Porsche Boxster learns your driving style

A single, simple, all-in-one interface, like that provided by Google for search

Community of kindred spirits, like SlashDot, The WeLL, and MetaFilter

Ability to share information and comments, as with my blog

Show me what others are interested in, as with pointers from BlogDex

At one time, functions like these would have been impossible or at least prohibitively costly to contemplate. The interoperability made possible by Web services standards, both .NET and J2EE, changes the game. Additional services can be bolted on to existing infrastructure.

Looking back to Geoffrey Moore’s concept that core activities create greater shareholder value than context, many of these informal learning add-ons will probably be provided by third party specialist firms.

What’s the best way to invest in informal learning?

Informal learning has always played a larger role than most people imagined, but it’s becoming increasingly important as workers take responsibility for their own destinies. Formal learning consists of instruction and events imposed by others. When a worker chooses his path to learning independent of others, by definition, that’s informal.

Several years ago the late Peter Henschel, then director of the Institute for Research on Learning, raised theimportant question on this. If three-quarters of learning in corporations is informal, can we afford to leave it to chance? [13]

If you agree that the answer to Peter’s question is no, here are three suggestions for organizations seeking to boost results by focusing on informal learning:

Appendix

Seven Principles of Learning

From extensive fieldwork, the Institute for Research on Learning developed seven Principles of Learning that provide important guideposts for organizations. These are not “Tablets from Moses.” They are evolving as a work in progress. However, it is already clear that they have broad application in countless settings. Think of them in relation to your own experience.

Learning is fundamentally social. While learning is about the process of acquiring knowledge, it actually encompasses a lot more. Successful learning is often socially constructed and can require slight changes in one’s identity, which make the process both challenging and powerful.

Knowledge is integrated in the life of communities. When we develop and share values, perspectives, and ways of doing things, we create a community of practice.

Learning is an act of participation. The motivation to learn is the desire to participate in a community of practice, to become and remain a member. This is a key dynamic that helps explain the power of apprenticeship and the attendant tools of mentoring and peer coaching.

Knowing depends on engagement in practice. We often glean knowledge from observation of, and participation in, many different situations and activities. The depth of our knowing depends, in turn, on the depth of our engagement.

Engagement is inseparable from empowerment. We perceive our identities in terms of our ability to contribute and to affect the life of communities in which we are or want to be a part.

Failure to learn is often the result of exclusion from participation. Learning requires access and the opportunity to contribute.

We are all natural lifelong learners. All of us, no exceptions. Learning is a natural part of being human. We all learn what enables us to participate in the communities of practice of which we wish to be a part.

Everyone has the capacity to learn but most people can do a much better job of it. Learning is a skill one can improve. Learning how to learn is a key to its mastery.

Learning is the primary determinant of personal and professional success in our ever-changing knowledge age. People and organizations that strive to succeed had better get good at it. Our goal is to help them.

The Meta-Learning Lab focuses on the process of learning – helping individuals learn how to learn and groups how to create optimal learning environments.

http://www.meta-learninglab.com

About the Author

A veteran of the software industry and the training business, Jay Cross coined the term “eLearning” in 1997. He is CEO of eLearning Forum, a 1500-member think tank and advocacy group, and founder of Internet Time Group. The Group helps organizations learn and perform on Internet time. Breathtakingly fast.

Jay helped SmartForce position itself as “the eLearning Company.” He worked with Cisco e-Learning Partners to help them implement and market their initial web-based certification programs. Today he coaches corporate executives on getting the most from their investments in eLearning, collaboration, and visual learning. More than a thousand people visit www.InternetTime.com every day to receive Jay’s insights on eLearning. He is co-author of the recent book Implementing eLearning.

In previous lives, Jay sold mainframes the size of SUVs, designed the University of Phoenix’s first business degree program, and joined the Inc 500 for taking a training start-up to prominence in less than three years.

Jay has spoken at Online Learning, Training, Online Educa, Image World, Instructional Systems Association, eLearning Guild , eLearning Forum, Learning Objects Symposium, ASTD International, Training Directors Forum, and other events. He delivered the inaugural keynote to the first meeting of the Online Banking Association. He is the author of numerous articles and white papers on eLearning and business effectiveness. He is a founding fellow of the Meta-Learning Lab.

Jay was born in Hope, Arkansas, (in the same room as Bill Clinton) and grew up in Virginia, France, Texas, Rhode Island, and Germany. He lives with his wife Uta and two miniature longhaired dachshunds in the hills of Berkeley, California.

He is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Business School, and has subsequently studied instructional design, systems analysis, programming, leadership, information architecture, decision-making, direct marketing, and design.

[2] “Human value chain” is my shorthand for weighing the costs and contributions of the workforce holistically, i.e. counting factors such as turnover, ramp-up time, recruiting, organizational savvy, working relationships, and corporate acculturation.

[3] The mission of CapitalWorks (www.capworks.com) is to optimize the performance of human capital. “We work with our clients to increase business growth and value creation. We focus on aligning their strategic and organizational dynamics. We help our clients optimize the continuous learning and know-how resident in their organizations. We work with them to apply adaptive architectures — both social and digital — that leverage their investments and improve their operating performance.

[6] Thanks to Ted Kahn, Ph. D., for guiding my thinking on this. Ted is a former associate of Institute for Research on Learning. He is CEO of Design Worlds for Learning and co-founder of Capital Works.

Things should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. implementing 70-20-10 is not simple. Sharing 50 suggestions on putting 70-20-10 to work has consumed five posts spread over two months. Today the series is complete. Here’s what you’ll find:

Post 1People learn their jobs by doing their jobs. Effective managers make stretch
assignments and coach their team members. Experience is the teacher, and managers shape their teammembers’ experiences. Knowledge work has evolved into keeping up and taking advantage of connections. We learn to do the job on the job. To stay ahead and create more value, you have to learn faster, better, smarter.

The Coherent Organization. As standalone companies realize that they’re really extended enterprises, co-learning with customers and stakeholders becomes important as everyone faces the future together. Players throughout the corporate ecosystem need to be operating on the same wave-length. This can only happen when we’re adapting to the future, i.e. learning, at the same pace.Internally, everyone needs to stay current.

These posts offer guidance to managers who want to make learning from experience and conversation more effective. Replacing today’s haphazard approaches with systematic, enlightened management accelerates the development of future workers and gets the entireorganization working smarter. The potential is great.

Charles Jennings made 70:20:10 a guiding philosophy of learning during his eight-year tenure as Chief Learning Officer at Reuters, the world’s largest information company. (Disclosure: Charles and I are colleagues at the Internet Time Alliance. He is the world authority on 70:20:10 and these posts draw heavily on his work.)

Post 2The 70 percent: learning from experience. People learn by doing. We learn from experience and achieve mastery through practice. Experience is a difficult task master. We learn more from making a mistake than from getting it right the first time. That’s why wise managers throw team members into stretch assignments. It accelerates learning. Being ejected from one’s comfort zone is why some say that the only thing worse than learning from experience is not learning from experience. Matching the most appropriately challenging experience to the developmental stage of the worker is the most powerful lever in the manager’s toolbox.

Charles Jennings reports that performance inevitably improves when managers ask their team members these three simple reflective questions:

What are your reflections on what you’ve been doing since we last met.

What would you do differently next time?

What have you learned since we last met?

Post 3The 20 percent: learning through others. Learning is social. People learn with and through others.

Conversations are the stem cells of learning. Effective managers encourage their team members to buddy up on projects, to shadow others and to participate in professional social networks. People learn more in an environment that encourages conversation, so make sure you’re fostering an environment where people talk to each other.

A Community of Practice (CoP) is a social network of people who identify with one another professionally (e.g. designers of logic chips) or have mutual interests (e.g. amateur photographers). Members of CoPs develop and share knowledge, values, recommendations and standards. An effective community of practice is like a beehive. It organizes itself, buzzes with activity and produces honey for the markets.

Post 4Formal learning includes courses, workshops, seminars, online learning and certification training. Unfortunately, a lot of organizations aren’t using online learning to its full potential, and the results at those organizations reflect that. Learning expert Robert Brinkerhoff figures only about 15 percent of formal training lessons change behavior.12 This is a reflection of both formal learning creation and of the lack of focus on experiential and exposure learning. If what we learn is not reinforced with reflection and application, the lessons never make it into long-term memory.

Formal learning is typically conducted by an instructor. So why do we address it in a paper on managers? Because managers can make or break the success of formal learning programs. Research has found that the most important factor in translating formal learning into improved performance is the expectation set by managers before the training takes place13. Understanding the needs of the learners and following up after the event are also essential for formal learning success.

Post 5You will need to become a champion for the new approach to developing talent. You must convince your sponsor that managers and supervisors are the linchpins to developing new talent. Without them, the company could find itself with nobody on the bench to take on future challenges. For your career, this lead role is high risk/high reward.

Managers have to learn how to develop their people. It doesn’t always come naturally, and managers can get too busy to pay much attention to it. Let them know you don’t expect them to train their people. Rather, they will set examples for their team; they will foster experiential learning by leading their team to tackle new challenges (the 70), by helping them reflect on the lessons of experience and by coaching them at every step (the 20), and by showing them how to get formal learning on the subject (the 10).

Setting clear expectations and explaining how performance will be measured.

Providing stretch experiences that help their team members learn and develop.

Taking time to reflect and help team members learn from experience.

Managers who set clear objectives and expectations and explain how they measure performance are much more likely to succeed. Their teams outperform their peers by 20%. That’s an extra day every week to get the job done (and engage in deep learning). Managers should make explicit why they’re assigning particular projects, what they expect people to learn and what sort of debrief will occur after the assignment.

The 70-20-10 model depends on L&D teaming up with managers to improve learning across the company, but often managers do not appreciate how vitally important they are in growing their people.This is the absolute, must-do secret to success to improving learning and development. Frontline managers must take this as the very definition of manager: someone who develops others by challenging them with assignments that stretch them to the point of flow17. This takes a can-do manager who knows how coaching creates mental models and habits, how motivation activates a chain of high-performance activities and what success habits their team members need to adopt.

Charles Jennings says that the role that managers play is far more important than that of Learning and Development or HR. Your role is to help managers learn that:

People learn from experience.

Managers shape the experience of the people on their team.

Experience coupled with reflection sticks lessons in memory.

Daily mid-course correction is much more powerful than after-the-fact reviews.

Every project they assign is a potential learning experience for their team members.

Last year his class ran under his experimental class operating system in stealth mode. Howard Rheingold, Jerry Michalski, and others, myself included, have dropped by. The teacher will uncloak soon to reveal an interdisciplinary approach where students select what to learn from Open Education resources. Learning is experiential and self-directed.

If I may summarize 400 pages from a vague memory, the gist was that I acquire tacit knowledge experientially, say baking a brioche. When I’ve mastered the baking, I explain how I did it, thus making the knowledge explicit. The explicit knowledge is shared with others, who in turn internalize it, transmuting it back into tacit knowledge in their heads.